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The calm before the storm! Shawn, Julian and Elysium team up to debate the current trends in the gamer market while Rob checks in with some quick game impressions from Wizard World. We also announce the football nickname NCAA contest winner and give you a quick preview of what's to come from Gen Con next week! Apologies for the rougher than usual audio, we had a bit of a meltdown.

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GWJers are definitely not the average gamer. You're the hardcore. The early adopter. The ones that own more than one console. That buy 20 or 30 games a year. I mean you guys talked about who the majority of gamers are,well, look at what Epic said recently. Only 40% of folks who bought Unreal 2k4 went online with it. 40%!!!! That's for a game that was made basically for online play and is a hardcore game.

Games like Madden and Need for Speed reach out to both hardcore gamers and to folks who otherwise wouldn't play video games. I mean there's plenty of folks that only play sports or racing video games. Those latter folks are a different type of hardcore gamer tho. They play one game or one genre.

The Wii is taking off because WiiSports is something new and fun and I think it breaks down the stereotypical gamer image when folks are standing up and moving around. I mean pressing a button to swing a bat is just as easy as swinging the wiimote, but nowhere near as fun. Also I'm not sure what defines a hardcore game either. Back in the day Pac-man was a casual game and a hardcore game. That's the way most games were.

I think the hardcore games might disappear a bit. But only because the costs of game development are rising while the hardcore audience isn't growing as you say.

Look at the sim scene on the pc compared to 10 years ago or so. It's disappeared. Look at the wargame scene. YOu don't see those games lining retail shelves like they did before. The audience ain't there to support the budgets for the higher tech in use today. So it's not a stretch to see that games that target narrow non-growing demographics can't keep being made on ever increasing budgets.

In light of Certis' attempt to smear my good name, I will point out that I do not, and never have, owned NCAA Football 08.

I don't know how Certis would come to this conclusion, with plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Also, I had plenty of other coulda-been-winner football names!

Although I thought I might have a winner in "Unnecessary Gruffness", I was extremely fond of "Read and Redact", which is football/editor mash-up GOLD.

Among my other favorites:
"He Debate Me"
"1337ness" (in honor of Walter Payton)
"Lake Minneseanka"
"Handcuff" (fantasy football players get this one, this absolutely needs to become some backup scrub's nickname)

I also thought "Dig Dug" was a nice spin on "Pac Man", especially for someone with the last name of Sands.

Great show guys. I guess you felt sorry for Rob's voice and so you lowered the quality of the rest of you too

BTW the uncharted link is broken... i know i haven't said this before but i really like Long Midnight - meant to say that a few podcasts ago.

Personally i really don't feel (and as an extension the GWJ crew: Sean, Shawn, Rob, Cory and Murdoch) that i am part of the new demographic that's coming into gaming. These are people who don't buy games magazines or consume the surrounding media for games. You try and talk to them about a game, games in general or even the hardware and you immediately feel the cold sinking feeling of knowing that you've committed a conversational faux pas by going over the other person's knowledge of the subject. Especially when they stare blankly at you for a moment before shifting uncomfortably and admitting that they had no idea that the specific feature existed.... nor perhaps cared.

Another great 'cast guys! On the topic of "Gamers" and the definition thereof, I have to lean more towards Rabbits argument. Personally, I think the real situation is the "dilution" of the word "Gamer". Five to ten years ago, if you played video games, I would pretty much assume that you were a Hardcore gamer. Nowadays, if I asked if you've played a computer or console game in the past week, I would be hard pressed to assume that you were a hardcore gamer. It's an issue of dilution of the "gamer" brand.

Heck, I just had to go and repair my wife's grandmother's computer (Grandmother-in-law?) so that she would be able to sign into yahoo games for her regular game of Hearts. My wife has to be near the fastest minesweeper fingers on the planet, but is extremely reluctant to pick up a non-wii controller. My parents actually indicated that buying them a Wii for christmas wouldn't be a terrible idea, and I don't think I've ever seen them attemopt to play a game in the past.

Conversely, all my "Hardcore gamer" friends have pretty much stayed that way, with the requisite cutting back on overall game playing time to spend time with their families. Granted, I'm also seeing their kids growing up to take gaming for granted as a typical part of life.

It always comes down to the definition of "Hardcore" gamer. As gaming becomes more accepted as a typical part of society, the assumption that "if you play videogames, you're probably a hardcore gamer" falls by the wayside because of the massive injection of new "casual gamers". In my mind, it can only be good for the overall videogame market. Also, I tend to believe that the overall number of hardcore gamers will continue to increase in absolute numers, their relative weight in the market will be reduced by the acceptance of casual gaming by the general public.

I also tend to agree that game companes focusing on the casual market doesn't take anything away from us "hardcore" gamers. Looking at the next six month's worth of "hardcore" games, I find myself drowing in a disk filled sea of high-quality games with the lingering question of how to fit them all into my schedule. It seems to survive quite nicely next to the nevernding stream of mini-games, simple puzzle games, and non-game games that the casual crowd devours with fervor. I daresay, there should be a "hardcore casual gamer" moniker in the making.

Of course, we could see a reversal of this trend in 30-40 years when the first wave of hardcore gamers begins to die off, but I'm taking a wait-and-see approach on that proposition...

Steam: DrGandalf, Xbox Live: Johnvanjim
"War is god's way of teaching Americans geography." - Jon Stewart
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - Howard Philips Lovecraft